PPS Announcing Data Product Version Change for GPM Level 2 and Level 3 GPROF Data -Available Starting Mon Feb. 04, 2019

Beginning on Monday February 04, 2019, the Level 2 and Level 3 GPM GPROF products will be produced with an updated monthly emissivity class file (see developers comments below).  PPS will increment the product version for all Level 2 and Level 3 GPROF products starting with the first full orbit on data date February 1, 2019.  The current version of these products will cease with data date Jan 31, 2019 and will remain unchanged. 
The new production version numbers/ designations will be incremented as shown in the table below.

Data Source                     Product Version                       
F16_SSMIS                              V05B                                                 
F17_SSMIS                              V05B                                                 
F18_SSMIS                              V05B                                                 
GCOMW1_AMSR2                V05B                                                 
METOPA_MHS                       V05D                                                
METOPB_MHS                       V05D                                                
NOAA18_MHS                       V05D                                                
NOAA19_MHS                       V05D   
NOAA20 ATMS                      V05B                                             
NPP_ATMS                             V05E                                                  
The changes made to this GPROF version update are described (below) by the algorithm developer.  Please also refer to the attached ".pdf"  file  to see the geographic area affected.

Emissivity class repair

A monthly emissivity class file is used within the surface type assignment to define the GPROF surface class and thus select similar database profiles.  While examining IMERG data in a new polar stereographic projection, many areas of erroneous precipitation (very high precipitation rates) were observed.   This was found to be caused by incomplete and incorrect assignment of the surface type in Northern Canada and Greenland.   Using an Autosnow created climatology, these surface types were changed in the GPROF ancillary files to a new snow class, instead of a open water classification.  The result greatly reduced the retrievals of anomalous high precipitation, and occur only over the areas highlighted in the following figure.  Precipitation retrievals in ALL other areas are not affected.

All products are in the HDF5 format and will use the GPM naming conventions.  This new GPM data will appear both in STORM: https://storm.pps.eosdis.nasa.gov/storm/
and on "arthurhou":
ftp://arthurhou.pps.eosdis.nasa.gov/

Please visit our registration portal for access to GPM data products if you have not previously registered with PPS:
https://registration.pps.eosdis.nasa.gov/registration/

Level 2 and Level 3 GPROF product release notes and other documentation can be found on the PPS public website at:
https://pps.gsfc.nasa.gov/GPMprelimdocs.html
Other level 2 / level 3 documentation can be found at:
https://pps.gsfc.nasa.gov/atbd.html
and:
https://pps.gsfc.nasa.gov/ppsdocuments.html
on the PPS public website:
https://pps.gsfc.nasa.gov/ 
Please contact the PPS Helpdesk if you have any questions, comments or concerns.